Cute As A Button!

Hello! How is everyone?! 

We've got some exciting things to talk about! First of all we're so excited to announce that we've had over 1,000 visits to our blog! Thank you so much! This has been such a fun experience for the three of us. We love that we can share what we love and we hope that we spark some creativity in our viewers  Thank you again so much for supporting us!

Secondly, in honor of our hitting 1,000 views, we're gearing up for our first giveaway! Depending on how much of a response we get, we're hoping this will be a semi-regular thing. We'll be posting more information on the giveaway very soon!

Finally, we've settled on our new theme for October: Buttons!

Buttons are getting very popular in the crafting world for so many reasons. They are so cute and so versatile in how they can be used. All three of  us decided to make a new card using buttons to show how many different ways that buttons can be used!

Marisol took an adorably animal approach to this challenge! The zebra paper and stamp make this card pop! She has a fantastic ability with blending! This is a great example that you don't have to use the same paper pattern throughout the entire card. The black ribbon accented by her green button gives a nice break in the card to change things up! The color scheme really is fun and creatively used here!

Hannah made this beautiful card! She used her well loved cloud punch in a variety of paper to create these dimensional rain clouds. The use of black was so smart! The streams of rain were created using a pen and some glitter! And the best part, the button rain drops! Her umbrella sentiment just gave the card the sweetest touch.

This is Joyce's take on the button challenge. In this card she used a pretty lace punch and a coordinating paper patter to give the inside and back a unique finish. Lastly, she strung some buttons on a string around the front of the card with some baker's twine. 

We all really enjoyed this challenge and we're going to be posting more cards we make throughout the month on our Instagram page so follow us there to see what else we come up with!

And don't forget to keep an eye out for our giveaway coming up VERY SOON! Thank you again to everyone for visiting our page! Let's make it 2,000 views very soon! 

The 3 Chicks,

Hannah, Marisol & Joyce

What's up with Washi Tape

                                What's up with Washi Tape?

Washi Tape. Its all over Pinterest and taking over our favorite craft isles. If your like me I couldn't pass up the adorable prints. So I took some home with me and did my research ;) Just a little background info Washi is a style of Japanese paper tape. The manufacturing has spread throughout the world! Washi tape is reusable, biodegradable, and tree free (usually made of rice paper) In a few short minutes I came up with 4 cards and all together it took me under 10 minutes! Take a look at my results 

 I used a Border stamp for the top and bottom of the card and added my Washi Tape and gems to the middle

The focus of this card is the shine street lamp stamp and i added 3 strips of tape to the right for embellishment

Its a little hard to see from the lighting but the stamp in the middle is the Eiffel tower with a chevron background. This time I added the tape haphazardly. I love how it turned out!

I found this cute bike stamp at the bottom of my craft bin and thought it looked adorable with the matching tape

Washi Tape....You can tear it, cut it, stick it,reposition it,and write on it... The possibilities are endless!!!! I am now a Washiholic :) So the next time your in Michael's and the cutest printed tape is calling your name and telling you to take it home, It might be worth it! 

3 chicks,

Hannah, Marisol, And Joyce 

From the Scrap Pile to High Style: Starburst!

Hello everyone!

We're very excited about this post, so we're going to get right to it! In our last post we talked about using scraps the whole month of August and it's been such a fun challenge! We hope you're keeping up with our Instagram page to see all that we've been doing.

We have a new video tutorial on how to turn your scraps into a beautiful sunburst card. So click the link below and head on over there to see how to make your own versions of this great technique!

Click Here to see our new video!

Thank you for coming by and we hope you'll stop again soon!

The 3 Chicks,

Hannah, Marisol & Joyce

Things We Love!

Hello Craft Lovers!

How is everyone doing?! We hope the answer is great! We're doing pretty great ourselves. Summer has been such a busy time for all of the Chicks that we've barely spent anytime on our computers or even in our craft rooms! *Gasp!* We have been creating a little here or a little there so if you're feeling the withdrawal from our blog or our YouTube channel, make sure to subscribe to our Instagram page. We keep that updated much more often! We do have some pretty fun things planned, so we're hoping to be doing more tutorials and blog posts in the coming months. 

One of the fun things, is this new segment we call "Things We Love." Here we'll showcase our favorite crafting tools, papers we swoon for and all the other things that made us open our wallets so we could take them home! We hope these posts will inspire you to get crafting!

Not too long ago, Hannah and I (Joyce) we're out killing some time at our local craft stores with my nephew, Jayden. He's only two and a half but he's a crafting deal spotter already! While we were at Michael's, Hannah spotted these great little ink pads by ColorBox Mix'd Media Inx on clearance for less than $2 each! We just had to have them!

I took home the (in order from left to right) Pewter, Patina, and School House. I just love them! I wish I would have taken home one in every color because they are such nice inks! The pads are nicely saturated and the colors are very vivid! (I'll show a stamp off sampling in just a moment.) Another thing I love about these stamps is that they are easily stackable which is awesome for saving space and keeping my favorite inks together!

The next place we went to was Hobby Lobby and we just love their clearance section! I think I can safely say that all three of the Chicks much prefer the cling stamps to the rubber block mounted stamps. The cling stamps are easier to clean, stay crisp longer and store away with much less space taken. But they are not really something you find in the clearance section too often. So in these instances, I love rubber block mounted stamps! I found these little gems on our last trip there:

The sentiments read (again, from left to right): Good friends don't spill the beans, a sail boat picture, The heart that loves is always young - Greek Proverb. I think they are all adorable  Where I might not have taken the plunge for the original $8 and up stickers, I'm more than happy to take them home at the very discounted prices. 

So with these new ink pads and these new stamps I did a little stamp off test for everyone to see why I LOVE the new inks! For those who may not recognize the term "Stamp Off" it refers to the action of saturating a stamp with ink one time, then making multiple stampings before re-saturating the stamp again with more ink.

You can see that inks held up really well the second time and even the third time with the School House red and the Patina blue colors! The Pewter grey color did very well, and I think if the stamp had not had such a flat surface for LOVES that it might have looked just as crisp. Also, a darker color paper would probably have done more justice to the Pewter, but I was still very happy with the result. 

I did make a card using the Patina blue color ink. My nephew wanted to send a card to a family friend of ours who gave him a bunch of hand-me-down clothes that he loved. (He didn't know he wanted to send a card, but we knew he did.) Even on bright green paper, the blue still was the focus and I just love the results! What do you think?

The glittery strip was a scrap from some previous card albums I had made. It just adds a little something! I love the sentiment and the tiny turtle, I think both make it a great card from a kid. 

So that's it for this edition of Things We Love, we hope you enjoyed it! Keep on the lookout for more installments of this segment! Also, for the month of August we'll be making cards and other things using our scraps! We know you've got them and we're going to show you how to use them! Look for the headline post: From the Scrap Pile to High Style!

Take care and enjoy your summer!

The 3 Chicks,

Hannah, Marisol & Joyce

Hot for emboss month

Hi Friends!

 

No joke with the heat this month thus far.   Speaking of heat, this month us girls are "hot for embossing" this month.  What does that mean?  It means we will be making some projects using embossing. The two kinds of embossing are dry embossing or heat embossing. We hope to have some tutorials up this month distinguishing the difference from these two. 

 

Also, we would like to remind you that we are regular in posting projects on our Instagram account.  Follow us (threechickswithgluesticks) so you can see what we have been up to.  Hannah, our baker, has been busy making the most awesome cakes. 

 

Today, we would like to share a card tutorial using embossing powder (A.K.A. heat embossing).  Oh, and did I mention it was another interactive card?  They are so much fun to make!
 

Click here to see tutorial of this card

 

We hope everyone is having a safe summer so far.  Thank you all for your support!

 

The 3 Chicks,

Hannah, Joyce and Marisol

 

 

Interactive Card featuring Stkr.It

Wait till you see the card tutorial for today.  So hilarious!  This card is well over due for my mom who is an iPhone junkie.  uhh, seriously, no joke! Plus, who doesn't love an interactive card? 

 

Today, we are introducing a few new items or rather new to us chicks. Us chicks took a day to off to head on over to Archivers in Orland Park, IL.  This was our place to stock up on our scrapbooking supplies, but sadly they closed their doors last month.  Before they did we headed over there to take advantage of the final sale they had. Here is one of the stamp sets I purchased:

 

Isn't this one adorable?  It is what they call a "Front & Back" stamp set as you can see.  This was fun to play with.  But even funner to have it shaking on a Wobble sticker. I colored her in Prisma colored Pencils and of course added a bit of glitter.  Because what is a card without glitter? The next item is a really kool item it's called: Stkr.It

 

 

I never heard of this before but it caught my eye.  How cool would it be to receive a card only to find that you can scan your phone/iPad to get the message???  um, yeah, super kool! I hate my writing and sometimes I just don't know what to say in it.  Ever get like that?  Well, I can now use this to send photos, videos, songs or just my own voice! The recipient must have an iPhone/iPad or an Android. If they have one or the other then all they have to do is make sure they download any bar scan app. That's all that is required. Gotta try this to believe it.  In the meantime, head to our YT channel and check out the Tutorial using the stkr.it to make this card.

click here for YouTube Tutorial using Strk.It

 



Please leave a comment below if you have any questions, suggestions, requests or if you wanna just say Hi.  Thank you all for visiting us today.

 

The 3 Chicks,

Hannah, Joyce and Marisol

Tutorial Review: Gift Card Holder

Hello!

We do so much research for our projects to get inspired to do new things. That research comes from Google searches, Pintrest, and YouTube just to name a few. It's not uncommon to start with a tutorial as it is and tweak as you go. Today we're going to be looking at a tutorial I found a while back and just finally tried out for some graduation cards this year. 

Her name is Gina K and her YouTube account is StampTV. She's very talented and clearly she has been doing this a long time. Her style is very much like mine, I only wish I had all of her toys. Some day!

Today we'll be talking about her two-part tutorial for gift cards. It was very well done, of course, but there were a few things I tweaked along the way. First of all, I wanted to do mine in a more masculine look because I had a couple of guys graduating high school and I didn't want to give the traditional card to them.

She ran through the measurements pretty quick so I had to go back a couple of times to get all of them written down. I do like the sizes because you can get 2 gift card holders from one 8 1/2" x 11" cardstock. You can't beat saving paper! Here's they are:

Base Cardstock: 4 1/4" x 10"

• Score at: 3", 4", 5", 8"

Patterned Paper:

(Inside)

• 2 - 2 3/4" x 4"
• 1 - 3 3/4" x 4"
• 2 - 3/4" x 4"

(Outside)

• 2 - 2 3/4" x 4"
• 1 - 1 3/4" x 4"  (Top flap)

So here's what I'm using:

I used basic brown cardstock with my BoBunny Trail Mix collection 6" x 6" cardstock. I thought it turned out perfectly! Everyone who saw the finished product immediately knew it was for a guy and loved the patterns! I'll definitely be saving what I have left for more guy cards. So next I cut out all of my papers and scored my bases to match what she said:

Next she suggests using a corner rounder on all of the base corners and on the top and bottom patterned papers for both sides. I totally agree with this because I love the effect rounded corners give. Then everything gets glued on.

Outside patterns

It's a little hard to see in the picture, but on the outside patterns picture you can see there is some shiny red tape (super permanent double sided tape) on the outside edges on the blank areas. They were left intentionally blank because you won't be able to see the inside of the pocket for the card. So here we wanted to be sure not to put the adhesive too far in because then the card wouldn't fit. The only addition (not pictured here) that I ended up making was that I added a line of red tape along the outside edge because when I put the sides together and later added my card, I found that it could easily slip out. So this way it can be completely tucked inside the card and I felt much better about them possibly carrying around the gift card in the holder.

Inside patterns

Next she had everyone turn the card so that newly formed pocket stuck away from the card in order to make the slit for the card to tuck into. She had everyone cut 1/4" off of the pocket which looked ok, but you lose the layered effect on that area. I decided to just take an Xacto knife and my metal ruler and cut a slice on the score line the width of my card. it was invisible once folded and I got to keep my layered look.

Where she decided to move onto closing the card, I felt like it needed an area where I could write something. So I used the Spellbinders Label 17 and punched out a couple of light brown cardstock pieces for my sentiments  I "aged" them with some Tom Holtz Archival ink in Tea and Tuxedo Black. This is a hand done process so no two are ever the same, which I really like.

    

Now I was ready to move on to the outside. She stamped a rounded sentiment and punched it out with a round punch and layered it onto a ribbon horizontally with the flap side in front. I thought that looked nice, but I made a couple of changes for myself. I had a really cute "You Did It" stamp I wanted to use and I used it with the Label 17 collection on white and light brown. I used a very bright shiny wide green ribbon as my focal color splash. Since my sentiment was more vertical, I decided to wrap my card vertically and I placed the stamped sentiment on the "back" because I wanted it to be the focus. I really like the finished product!

 

All in all it was a great tutorial! This is definitely a pattern I will use for years to come! It is such an easy and quick card holder. I love all of the options you could do with the card. I also love how many different occasions you could use this for: Weddings, Anniversaries, Graduations, Just Because, the list goes on! And while I didn't make any great big changes, I made enough that it looks and feels like mine.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial review/breakdown of a some grad cards I made! Thank you for checking out our blog and we hope to hear from you soon. Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel and our Instagram page!

The 3 Chicks,

Hannah, Marisol & Joyce